David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Right now, fossil fuel corporations are literally raking in the profits, profiting from this bloody war. They're taking resources that belong to all Australians and then shipping it offshore for record profits, and we should have been taxing that yesterday. Free public transport would be an immediate cost-of-living relief measure that people need right now. It would allow people in cities and suburbs to see their loved ones, get to work and do the essential travel without the cost they face every time they go to the petrol bowser, and it would also free up fuel so that people in regional Australia—farmers—have enough supply to do what they need to do, to go to the doctor and to put food on the table. With the money we get from taxing fossil fuel corporations, we could be doing a whole lot more to help people—public transport, free; public education, amazing; and public health as amazing as it should be in this country.

I've got to tell you this: Australians want nothing to do with Trump's and Netanyahu's illegal war. We're being fleeced by corporations profiting from death and destruction, and the war parties here back in those corporations, not you. When push comes to shove, the war parties always pick the interests of Donald Trump and big corporations over the interests of people. The Greens are the only party in this place committed to peace. Australians don't get richer off war; they get poorer. They don't see the deaths of people in the Middle East as a business opportunity; they see it as a tragedy. Here, we're asking what it will take for the war parties, who are paid for by Gina Rinehart and the fossil fuel corporations, to tax big gas so that ordinary people have the life they need.